Zuko vs the World
by Lolcano
Summary: Zuko and his crew have many wacky misadventures looking for the Avatar.


Beneath the rock-hewn forms of the colossal woman sitting serenely in the alcoves of the temple, the people seemed so small. Against the pale pinkness of the morning sky which dropped below them into infinity, the little human forms which wandered through its vastness seemed nothing more than bugs, tiny ants who had somehow intruded on the house of a human, on something so big and vast that they could scarcely comprehend it.

Built by human hands and yet greater than any human, this was the mystery of the temple, a Kōan to which the Air Nomads had meditated day and night. Though they had shaped it, by its presence it then shaped them, a perpetual paradox of people and place. And here was the answer: that the vastness of the temple and the vastness of the soul were one and the same, in the soaring heights of the temple one could reach the soaring heights of the soul; in the bareness of the walls and the simplicity of its rooms which renounced all the glories of the world, the monks turned away from the world above and became one with the sky. The monks and their temple – they were one and the same, inexplicably entwined, and now one was gone and the emptiness hung uneasily over the temple, like a gash in the heavens, like the new moon that cast darkness over the earth.

But what did Zuko care? He thought the whole thing was stupid. Stupid airbenders. It was all their fault. This place was _literally_ nothing more a half-crumbling pile of rocks. Who in the world had the bright idea to build a temple upside-down? How utterly idiotic. It was just stupid as his tiny iron ship he had been stuck in for more than half a week, and he hated them both and the sooner he got out of either the better.

Because his uncle may go on and on about "oooh its so beautiful here look at this beautiful sunrise prince Zuko its just so beautiful blah blah blah who cares" but nothing could be beautiful until he got back home and he could sit in the serenity of the gardens and look over the beauty of the city, see, _that_ was beautiful, that is all he wanted to see.

Why was he here, and not there? It didn't seem real.

Standing here, in this place, on a balcony that hovered above nothingness, in a temple that hung inverted from the cliff-face, it felt so surreal. It was really too strange to be believed. He could not believe that he was so far from home, that he would not wake up in the morning in his own bed.

It all seemed like a dream, the last few days. A hazy nightmare, tinged with fire.

But matter how much he tried to push them aside, the memories returned violently in flashes and engulfed him.

The meeting, the fight, the ship, tossing and turning, the sea was churning, and his eye was burning and his body tossing and turning in nightmarish sleep, waves crashing, his uncle sitting beside him, steam wafting gently from his teacup. And there were the flames burning, higher and higher, and everyone was watching and he heard their voices like a roar, like the roar of fire. And his uncle shook him awake and gave him water and pressed a cool compress to his eye and he fell back down on his bed and did not know where he was, until at last he remembered, and wished that he had not. Shame. Disgrace. Dishonour. But why? What had he done to deserve this? He turned this over in his head, over and over, in the small room on this ship that travelled across the unending sea, perhaps forever. Why had this happened to him? What had he done wrong? Because he just _had_ to speak out, because he was _weak_ , or maybe because his father had _never_ …. No, don't think about it now.

Don't wonder what is good and bad, what is right and what is wrong. It only made things worse, it fell heavily in his stomach, a deep dark unease that engulfed him, surrounded him, drowned him so he couldn't escape. There was only one thing that he had to think about, only one thing that mattered.

 _Where was the Avatar?_

That was his way out. The escape from this terrible nightmare. It was no small task. Yet his father had entrusted this important task to him alone. Yes, that's what he had to think about.

So the ship cut through the water and he sat in his room and brooded and considered: _where was the Avatar?_ This was all just a dream that would disappear with the morning. He would find the Avatar, it couldn't be hard. His father in his mercy had given him a second chance. He had entrusted him with this task, this one important job, and this time he wouldn't mess things up. He would restore his honour.

He just had to find the Avatar. It couldn't be that difficult, could it? He'd be back in no time. Sure, they've been looking for the Avatar for generations and still hadn't found him. But this time it would be different. Probably they had just missed something very obvious, and he just had to _look_ , and then he'd find the Avatar and he could go home. He could go home and they'd shower him with accolades and glory and honour and his father would love him and he'd be invited to all the meetings all the time.

So where was the Avatar?

He just needed to find him; then he could go home and everything would be right again, to the warm familiar halls of the palace, which he knew by heart, which stayed in his heart even while he was gone, whose halls he longed to walk once more.

Home…

Soon, he would return home.

So that's why, he decided in the end, the Avatar HAD to be at one of the Air Temples. The Avatar was an Air Nomad and nomad or not, in the end… Everyone wants to go home.

* * *

This all began a hundred years before.

Back then, Fire Lord Sozin had scoured the earth in search of the Avatar.

For Sozin it had been a deadly serious venture, a pursuit bordering on obsession. Sozin had created an empire: a world of technological advancement and prosperity that would proceed to all nations beneath the sun, he had held high the glowing torch of knowledge and enlightenment and yet this beautiful flame, this wonderful light of his could all be extinguished with a single gust of wind, with the actions of one single person: the Avatar. And all this hard work, all this beautiful progress, his most wonderful vision… it would all be plunged into darkness. He could not allow it.

And so he searched for the Avatar. He swore he would search to the ends of the earth if he had to. He swore that this search would never end. He swore that until the Avatar was found the Fire Nation would create a constant vigil, a watch perpetual day and night for any sign that the Avatar still lived and breathed upon this earth. He set up an elite team of firebenders who scoured the earth by sea, led by him himself, travelling to all corners of the globe in search of the Avatar.

But he never found him. The Avatar had vanished.

Some people believed that the cycle was broken. That the Avatar had never been reborn into the Air Nomads after all. In the Fire Nation they said it was a boon of the spirits. The spirits themselves had prevented the Avatar from returning. It was proof that they were a favoured people – the spirits themselves were on their side. They had entered a glorious new world – the old order had passed away and now they were entering an era of Fire and Steel where the Fire Nation reigned. What need was there for balance? They had passed into the age of Fire and their destiny was manifest.

Even so, the search that Sozin had established so many years ago to be a perpetual vigil upon the earth, a ceaseless watchmen in the night, never truly ended. The rest of the world moved on, but the perpetual search persisted; a dusty appendix of the bureaucracy, a forgotten legacy that no one took really took seriously anymore. At the time of Fire Lord Sozin, it was entirely under the jurisdiction of an old Admiral who used the ship to cruise through the tropics and visit all-expense-paid resorts. After all, you never knew where the Avatar might show up!

But then, all of the sudden, and without any warning at all, the old Admiral was replaced with Prince Zuko, the eldest son of the Fire Lord. The Admiral cursed his bad luck and wondered if somebody had finally looked a little more closely at all those expenses he had submitted to the government as "work related activities". He bid his crew farewell and set of to the capital, hoping to use old connections to schmooze his way into some new sinecure.

The crew was sad to see him go. They had enjoyed staying at the clear white beaches of the Northern Earth Kingdom. They had enjoyed sitting idly beneath a warm hot sun, the heat wrapping around them like a blanket, drinking margaritas served by beautiful Earth Kingdom girls. They didn't understand the reason for the sudden change in command, or for that matter, why they suddenly had to walk what felt like a thousand miles inland just to reach some stupid temple, then do a death-defying climb down a sheer cliff space then spend an entire day scouring every inch of that temple just to look for somebody who was probably long dead, and most likely didn't exist at all.

But well, they were soldiers. And their commander had told them, "We are going to search this whole temple! I don't want to see a single stone left unturned!" and so that is exactly what Qumaq intended to do.

"Yeah no," said Suzon, soldier in the Fire Nation army and currently serving under the command of Prince Zuko, Avatar searching division, "I'm pretty sure that was a metaphor."

"Uh, no," said Qumaq as he picked up the smallest pebble possible from the floor and examined it carefully, "Did you not _hear_ him? I'm _pretty_ sure he was being literal."

"Okay Qumaq, you see, there is something in our language called 'a figure of speech' and - "

"Rocks!" declared Qumaq, eyeing the pebble with great suspicion, "Can't trust them! You never know what they might be hiding!"

After reluctantly concluding that this particular rock at least was not secretly harbouring the Avatar within its rocky contours, Qumaq let it drop to the ground, where it promptly ricocheted of the floor and into his shin.

"Oof! See what I mean?"

"Yeah rocks trying to kill you. I too served in the Earth Kingdom," said Suzon, "Let's keep moving."

They moved to the next room, which was pretty much identical to the last room. After Qumaq checked beneath a few more rocks, just in case, they moved to the next room, which was pretty much identical to the last room. When they finished with that room, they moved to the next room, which was pretty much identical to the last room.

The next room, at least, had a vase in it, which made it slightly more interesting than the last room. It was a pretty nice vase too. The porcelain flowed downward like milk, a creamy pure white. Flowers and leaves, blue as a river, danced over its surface, so life-like it seemed almost to leap from the vase.

Qumaq noticed that Suzon seemed enthralled with it, and stroking his chin he examined the vase as well.

"It _is_ pretty suspicious," he said at last, "But I doubt the Avatar's inside."

Suzon just rolled his eyes.

"Don't you realize what this is?" he said, "This is a genuine Earth Kingdom Ming Dynasty vase!"

"Umm..okay?"

"It's Ming Dynasty, Qumaq, the Ming Dynasty!"

"Oh sorry, I didn't realize that it was from the Ming Dynasty."

Suzon continued staring at the vase. Then after taking a furtive glance around him, he said:

"If I take this vase, nobody will know, right?"

"What?"

"Nobody's going to miss it here, right? Nobody's using it."

"Um…" said Qumaq, beginning to catch his friend's drift, "Do you really want to lug that thing all the way back to the ship?"

In fact, Suzon did.

At first Qumaq thought he was just doing it to annoy him. After all, that's the only reason why he insisted on checking beneath every rock; he just wanted to see Suzon's face (Hilarious. Every time). But when Suzon actually dragged the not unsubstantially sized vase out the door with him, the absolute madman, he realized the guy was actually being serious.

"Um…. Do you need help carrying that?"

"No no, I've got it."

Suzon cradled the vase in his arms as if it was his first-born child.

He thought about making a comment about that. If he said, "Aya better watch out or she's going to be replaced as the favourite child." would Suzon get mad? But then again, Suzon tended to just get sad wherever Aya was concerned, so maybe the comment would be considered insensitive?

He wondered about this as he strolled through the empty hallways of the temple, then decided not to risk it. He didn't want to put Suzon in a bad mood. His company was the only thing keeping him from going insane.

It was like a labyrinth in here. He didn't like it. No matter how hard they searched, and no matter how long, they never encountered another human being. Maybe they shouldn't have split up. But then it was 'more efficient' apparently. Or so they said. (who was they? Not him! Nobody ever asked _him_ anything.) What it really was was eerie. It seriously gave him the heebie jeebies.

They were probably the first people to set foot here for nearly a hundred years. Every so often they would find traces of people, and Qumaq would remember that this place hadn't always been so empty, that it had once been a thriving, vibrant place… or had been, until his people murdered them all.

Awkward.

In any case, it was creepy. It was like they were walking over bones.

They continued onwards. They found other items helter-skelter, a sprawl of belongings left in a room here, hastily left on the floor over there, testament to a rushed exodus so many years before. Small statues, beaded necklaces, a lacquered tea set, old relics. A secret stash of scrolls, belonging perhaps to a monk who was not quite as ascetic and pure as they claimed to be, a little box that held some old dried dates, ("Do you think they're still good?" asked Qumaq. "Why don't you try one and see?" said Suzon), old gliders whose wings had long rotted away, a little toy air bison which had probably once belonged to a child, a child who was now long dead.

Yep, this place definitely gave him the heebie jeebies.

Once, carved into the wall, Qumaq found some carved graffiti that said "Nyima was here".

"Who do you think Nyima was, exactly?" said Suzon.

"Dunno. Don't care."

But the graffiti gave him an idea, and he spent the next five minutes carving his own name into the wall. There. "Qumaq was here". He felt satisfied. His name was carved eternally into the stone, this stone which had no gaps or blocks, it was one, carved out the bedrock itself, plummeting downwards into the sky and yet rooted upwards into something greater and grander then they could ever imagine.

"Way to vandalize a thousand year old temple," said Suzon.

"Hey, at least I'm not looting it."

They continued. They travelled down hallways which suddenly opened up into a series of arches, a forest of pillars, intricately carved, the forms of sky bison frolicking amidst wispy clouds made of stone, they travelled through vast stone rooms dominated by enormous statues, through ancient kitchens and dormitories.

Here is where they mediated, here is a one million year old air nomad musical instrument, probably used in sacred ceremonies, here is an ancient relic used for ritualistic purposes, here is where they trained in the ancient art of air-bending, here is…. Hm, well, Qumaq wasn't exactly sure what this room was for.

He peered inside the small room at the end of the hall, looking at the strange stone blocks that were sticking out like dominoes on every side of the wall. What could it be? Did it serve some ceremonial purpose? What ancient mysterious purpose could this hallowed building hold?

He touched the low, out jutting stones, trying to glean its mysteries. There was a small gutter which traversed the room behind the stones, leading to a drain in one corner of the room.

"Hm…" said Suzon, "Looks kinda like a toilet."

"Hm…" said Qumaq. He really had to pee.

"Umm… what are you doing?"

"WAAGH!"

Suzon and Qumaq both jumped at the sudden voice. Quickly pulling up their pants, they turned around to see a familiar face.

"Kazuma!"

"I see you've found your natural habitat."

"Shut up, where else are we supposed to go?"

"Hey, I don't judge," said Kazuma, "Have you found anything yet?"

"Sure," said Qumaq, "We found a vase." He pointed to the large white and blue vase which Suzon had insisted on lugging along with them all this time. "It's from the Ming Dynasty," he added drily.

"Aw, you're just jealous," said Suzon, "Look at it Kazuma! It's beautiful!"

"Nice," said Kazuma appreciatively, "You guys are on fire tonight."

"Hah," said Qumaq.

"What's so funny?" asked Suzon.

"Nothing… It's just that's exactly what the Fire Nation said to the Air Nation the last time they were here."

The other two men groaned. "That's terrible!"

"Sorry." Qumaq looked ashamed of himself, but he still laughed a little sheepishly.

"So where is everybody?" asked Suzon.

"They're all down in the big opening where we first started out from. General Iroh is preparing supper. There are just a few stranglers left; I came to look for you two."

"Did you say supper?" said Qumaq, suddenly salivating. He hadn't realized how hungry he was.

"If there's food, by all means lead the way!" said Suzon, "But what exactly are we going to eat in here, rocks?"

"Told you we should have had those dates when we had a chance," muttered Qumaq.

Kazuma laughed. "What? Qumaq with a date? That would never happen."

"Oh, haha."

Talking and laughing with each other, the three soldiers headed back down the winding corridors of the temple.

* * *

Zuko stood in the middle of a hallway all alone, suddenly realizing that he didn't know where he was going. Maybe, he thought vaguely… maybe… he shouldn't have gone ahead of everyone else, maybe he should have… well he wasn't exactly sure what he _should_ have done. Finding the Avatar! As if that was easy. As if you could just march into a building and stumble upon him. Is that what he thought would happen? How does one even begin looking for the Avatar? And how did this huge, monumental task fall on his shoulders? He was only a kid. What did they expect him to do?

No, no, don't question it… It was an honour, he would restore his honour, he had to find the Avatar, his entire _life_ depended on it.

But as he wandered through the temple, only to come to ANOTHER dead end, to ANOTHER empty stone room that looked exactly like all the other empty stone rooms he had walked past in the last FIVE HOURS, and he started growing hungry and tired and felt like his legs would collapse from climbing all those stairs, he was beginning to think that maybe… Maybe this wasn't such a good idea. Well woopdedoo! Story of his life!

If it weren't for a constant _stream_ of bad ideas, then maybe he wouldn't be here at all! He could have been at home right now, instead of out here in this stupid stone temple, lost and alone.

Why was he so STUPID!

Why couldn't he go back? Why did time have to keep moving forwards? His footsteps echoed in the empty hallways like the beats of clock, steady, eternal, irreversible. Faster and faster, fueled by a desperate, hopeless rage, he stomped through the temple, looking for a find a way out.

He heard the distant sound of laughter. He stopped and looked out the window and there way below on the lower level of the temple was the distant sight of a raging fire and his Uncle and the others were drinking tea and eating and laughing and having a grand old time. They seemed so happy.

Of course they were.

This was just a game to them. They didn't realize how utterly SERIOUS it was. How IMPORTANT it was to him. They should be looking for the Avatar right now. But instead his uncle insisted on treating the whole thing like a nice old family vacation. But it WASN'T. His father had BANISHED HIM. And the only way back, the only way to restore his honor, was to find the Avatar! Did they know how BIG this world was? If they knew how many millions of places the Avatar could be, they wouldn't be wasting their time doing lame things like EATING and SLEEPING or HAVING FUN.

He headed back through the temple, trying his best to head in the direction he had seen from the window, stewing over the sight the whole way.

Was this a holiday? He kept saying to himself, No it isn't, so what business do they have slacking off?!

So when he finally got back, the first thing he said was not "hello" or "hey friends how's it going" but instead he shouted angrily, "What is the meaning of this!?"

"Prince Zuko!" said his uncle, "I'm so glad that you are back."

In Zuko's absence, Iroh had taken the opportunity to settle. He hadn't even managed to keep pace with Zuko as he had hurried through the temple earlier that day. He had lost him after the first tall staircase. Had he done _anything_ all day but sit here and set up this campsite? There were sleeping bags arranged beneath bright red canopies, there was a small campfire set up with a kettle boiling, and a tray of steaming hot tea. The soldiers all sat sprawled around a blazing fire, surrounded by the spoils of war, various trinkets that they had found amidst the temple (and none of it, Zuko could not help but note, was at all related to the Avatar), drinking tea and eating kebabs which were at the moment slowly cooking over a rack above the fire.

"Why aren't you looking for the Avatar?!" Zuko demanded, sweeping an angry look over the lazy soldiers. They at least had the decency to look a little guilty, but Iroh, sitting calmly in front of the fire sipping tea, did not seem disturbed.

"It is getting late, Prince Zuko. You have been searching all day. We all need a rest."

"I DON'T need to rest. I NEED to find the Avatar."

"Why don't you sit down and join us for some tea."

Without waiting for a response, Iroh poured Zuko a steaming cup of tea. Zuko glared at his uncle, but he realized that he really was thirsty. He had barely eaten or drunk anything all day. The smell of roasting meat, nearly cooked, wafted up from the fireplace. Unbidden, his stomach growled.

He sat down. His uncle smiled, then bustled about, preparing him a meal.

"Just wait until I show you the all-day echo chamber," chuckled Iroh, putting away the backscratcher, "What an amazing place this is. Oh, and Suzon found the most _wonderful_ Ming Dynasty vase and – "

The vase was sitting not to far from Zuko in all its splendour, but Zuko was not even the littlest bit impressed. He huffed. Why was his uncle going on like this? Why was he even sitting here? Who had time for tea, for food? How could they just sit there laughing when he was suffering!

He stood.

"WHO _CARES_ ABOUT A VASE!?" he shouted, "Unless it's the Avatar, I don't CARE what you find. And who told you all you could take a break anyways?!"

"Prince Zuko, I told them th – "

But it was too late. Zuko kicked the vase, and before everyone's horrified eyes it shattered into a million pieces, and there was silence.

"Enough! I want everyone to keep looking. Nobody can have a break until every room in this temple has been checked."

He stormed away.

The thick smell of burnt food filled the air. The fire had flared upwards, burning their food.

* * *

His footsteps intruded on the silence of the room, the silence which lay heavily in the room. Light poured, like honey, over the windowsills; sunlight congealed on the bottom of the floor.

Zuko stepped forward and the motion set the dust resting on the floor into violent swirling motion. Motes of dust shimmered in the sunlight, hovered gleaming in the air. He coughed, and the sound carried amidst the emptiness, echoing in the circular chamber until there was nothing left, until silence fell again like a shroud over the room.

And he was alone amidst the austere vastness of the chamber, and there was nowhere else to go, and above him hung the colossal weight of the bedrock and it weighed down on him and the emptiness weighed down on him and it sunk deep into his stomach and he knew that there was nowhere left to go, nowhere else to search in this temple, that it was all empty.

The Avatar wasn't here.

Why? Why did everything always have to be so DIFFICULT? Why couldn't things EVER be easy? The Avatar should be here. This was its home, wasn't it? The Air Temple. Who _wouldn't_ want to be at home, the home where they had grown up in, the home of all their memories, in the warm familiar halls draped with crimson finery, in the peaceful gardens watching the turtle ducks swim by, the city sprawling out below the palace alive with lights and noise… Home, where he had been only a week ago, a home he still did not understand he could not return to.

And now he was standing here, in an empty room at the very top of the Western Air Temple, so very far away from everything he had ever known. What were they doing right now, without him? Did anybody miss him?

He thought of the quietness of the gardens where he had often sat, his large empty room which echoed like this temple, his luxurious bed which towered above him and made him feel small and insignificant beneath its covers and he realized that nobody would miss him, and his father would be sitting right now beneath a curtain of fire that obscured all his thoughts and he would not spare a single thought his way, and maybe nobody was thinking about him at all, and the thought of this burned a hole inside of him that he filled with a fiery rage.

He wanted to get out of here. He wanted to scream and shout and burn down this whole stupid temple. It's not like anyone would care.

He walked towards one of the arched windows embedded in the vast circular room, hoping that some fresh air would clear his head. And he stared out at the sky which had no end, which plummeted downwards into capricious whirls of clouds and he realized, all of a sudden, that he might be out here forever.

The Avatar could be out there _anywhere_ in that endless expanse. It was all so BIG and he was so insignificant, so small. Against the golden afternoon sky which dropped below them into infinity, against the eternal roar of the heavens, the rushing wind which echoed eerily in the hallways, all the tiny human forms which wandered through its vastness seemed nothing more than bugs. He was a bug. And this temple was so big but the world was even bigger. What was a human against the vastness of the world? Even less than a bug. A speck. A mote of dust.

No, it couldn't be real, this was all just a bad dream. But the stones of the temple which he leaned against now were solid and real; the wind which whipped his ponytail in the wind, this was real. The sun, high now in the sky, spilling its golden light over the whole magnificent complex hanging in the sky as if gravity did not exist was too strange and beautiful to be imagined; this too was real.

His hand inched up to his bandaged eye and he knew in his heart that this was also real: that he was without honour, without glory, without a home.

It was real.

He felt something breaking inside of him and struggled to hold it together, he bit his lip and blinked and thought about how shameful it would be if he cried, because then he really _would_ be weak, just like his father thought he was, he really _would_ be without honour. He couldn't let that happen, he couldn't he couldn't…

The sunlight tinged the clouds creamy and gold and they fell down into eternity and this is where he would be now forever, without a home, without honour, without anything to call his own and the sky seemed so close and so far that it was dizzying and he considered for a moment what would happen if he fell down, would it ever stop? His whole life was like he was falling, falling and he didn't know when he would ever stop and he was tempted to let go and find out and maybe it would be easier that way, to just fall forever; nothing could be simpler and nothing would have to be difficult again.

But somewhere out there was the Avatar.

Yes, maybe it was impossible, maybe it was like looking for a single speck of dust in a sandstorm.

But nevertheless, the Avatar was out there somewhere.

And if the Avatar was out there, then the Avatar could be found. Even if it took him a million years, even if he had to search the remotest islands in the world… if that's what it took to find the Avatar, then Zuko would do it. Nobody thought he could do it, but he would. He WOULD find the Avatar.

Because once he found the Avatar, then he could go home. They'd give him honour and glory, love, adoration.

If he found the Avatar, all would be right with the world.

He could be happy.

And so, filled with a deep, churning determination, he left the empty room behind him.


End file.
